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GameSpy's 50 Favorite Console Games of the '80s

#28: Shinobi (1988)Platform: Master SystemDeveloper/Publisher: SegaIn a Nutshell: One of the many ninjas named "Joe" kicks ass and takes names as he tries to rescue his ninja village's ninja children from a rival ninja clan.

Will says: Like any red-blooded American guy who lived through the '80s, I loved (and still love) ninjas more than just about anything. Films like "American Ninja," "Enter the Ninja," and pretty much anything with Sho Kosugi in it fueled my desire to become a full-fledged ninja. But apparently my homemade throwing stars and nunchuks weren't "good," so I had to resort to living vicariously through videogames instead.

Enter Shinobi, arguably one of the finest ninja games of all time. I played hours and hours of Shinobi, both in the arcade and on a friend's Master System, yet still never managed to make it to the end of the game, thanks in large part to design decisions that boiled down to "let's screw players over as brutally as possible." Still, the journey to the end of the game was well worth the effort, combining inventive boss battles with challenging combat and intense platforming to create a memorable whole. Finally, if you know a surefire way to successfully complete the bonus stage, I'd love to hear it.

#27: Bomberman (1989)Platform: NESDeveloper/Publisher: Hudson SoftIn a Nutshell: A cartoony robot walks around and drops bombs in order to defeat monsters and escape room after room, in a quest to become human.

Anthony says: The original, single-player-only Bomberman isn't all that interesting when you stack it up against its successors, but it laid the foundation for one of my favorite multiplayer series ever. I don't think those of us who played Bomberman years ago understood that it had a story about a bomb-making robot seeking to become human, and -- thankfully -- Hudson's rarely tried to push it as a story-driven game. I mean, c'mon... who makes a factory just to make black bombs straight out of a Looney Tunes show? It's like Bomberman worked for ACME or something.

These days, Bomberman isn't even a franchise I think of as being single-player; instead, I look forward to new iterations solely because they give me more ways to blow my friends into little robotic bits. This is the game that paved the way.